Free The Mandates by Dave Singleton

offer rooms targeted to city and proclivity for every possible version of same-sex love. Chatting is a world of swapping GIFs and JPEGs, cyberpersonals, and endless possibilities. Conversation can range from numbingly banal to wrenchingly deep to wickedly naughty with each touch of the keyboard.
    If straight people “surf” the Net, then gay men “cruise” the Net. The options for meeting, chatting, and hooking up with other gay people are tremendous, with entirely new avenues of possibility for those who live in less populated areas, plus closet cases, fetishists, and married men. But the traffic is certainly not limited to those once-isolated groups. Deep in the heart of the most exciting city in the world, New York, the city that never sleeps, you’ll discover some of the hottest men in the world holed up in their apartments trolling AOL’s NYC m4m chat room.
    Actress Sharon Stone, secretly a gay man trapped in a woman’s body, once said, “Women might be able to fake orgasms. But men can fake whole relationships.”
    So how do you weed out the fakers from the real ones? How do you determine who is worth the time it’ll take you to think up a clever screen name like Hotstud4love and who gets logged out of your life?
    Here are some surefire do-and-don’t guidelines for picking the winners and weeding out the losers:

    The most important advice for dating someone you meet in a chat room or from an on-line profile is this: no matter what his pictures look like, or what he’s like in e-mails or on the phone, he’ll probably be different in person, so keep your expectations in check. Internet introductions are the parallel universe of dating, completely contrary to what we’re used to doing. Usually, if you meet a guy at a bar or a party, you act on whatever chemistry exists and later find out if you are compatible.
    With on-line dating, you know all the details about his life and whether you share common interests and goals right away. You might even know intimate details because it’s easy to reveal too much when you are creating a profile or a personal ad. Then you decide whether to meet him, at which point you find out if there’s any chemistry.
    Dating is all about compatibility and chemistry. With on-line dating, the order gets reversed. Your mind is a powerful tool and may wander off into dreamland quickly. Do everything you can to minimize your expectations. Hope for the best, be prepared for the worst, and set up the situation to your best advantage. Pick a meeting place where you’re comfortable. Make light of the situation beforehand by letting him know that these things can be awkward and that you’ve found it’s best to approach meeting as casually as possible.

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    RULE #1 FROM THE KENNEL APPLIES TO DATING: GIVE ROPE AND SPACE BUT NEVER LET THE DOG HAVE THE RUN OF THE YARD

    Brad Davis. Profile: Hot-looking thirty-five-year-old. Decent, really tries to be a good man. Lawyer who made partner by thirty. Well-off. Nice family. Brad Davis. Single. Why?
    Ask Brad Davis, a northern Californian now in his fourth year of therapy, why he’s still single and he’ll tell you. He’s too independent. His relationships never last more than a few months. The defining breakup factor appears to be the same character traits his ex-boyfriends initially loved about Brad—namely, his independence and easygoing nature. After all, what’s more attractive than a seemingly secure man who is comfortable within his own skin and undemanding?
    Brad’s mistake was not being independent and easygoing. His mistake was staying too easygoing after about three months of dating bliss.
    After three months of a casual, laid-back approach to dating, decent, mellow Brad needed to access his inner hotheaded Latin lover and pitch a fit over something. A sideways glance from another man at his boyfriend. A bad day at work. The boyfriend’s decision to